The Hellenistic Origin of the Torah—A Review of Russell Gmirkin’s Books, Part 2 of 4: Exodus and Manetho

Go to Part 1.

Is the Exodus a counter-narrative of a story of expulsion?

The biblical story of the Exodus has a prologue: the story of Joseph in Genesis 47. Having risen from the status of a slave to that of chancellor of Pharaoh, Joseph favors his kinsmen (despite having been sold into slavery by his brothers) and obtains for them “land holdings in Egypt, in the best part of the country.” In charge of the national grain reserves, he stores large amounts during the years of plenty; then, when famine strikes, he sells it at a high price and thus “accumulated all the money to be found in Egypt and Canaan.” The following year, having created a monetary shortage, he forces the peasants to relinquish their herds in exchange for grain: “Hand over your livestock and I shall issue you food in exchange for your livestock.” One year later, the peasants complain that they have nothing left “except our bodies and our land,” and so are reduced to begging, then have to sell themselves in order to survive: “Take us and our land in exchange for food, and we with our land will become Pharaoh’s serfs; only give us seed, so that we can survive and not die and the land not revert to desert!” And so the Hebrews, after settling in Egypt, “acquired property there; they were fruitful and grew very numerous” (Genesis 47:11–27), a sure sign of God’s blessing.

Although it is situated in pre-Mosaic times, Joseph’s story has a recognizable Hellenistic background. It reflects the very favorable condition of the Jews under the early Ptolemies, Greek pharaohs who ruled Egypt with little concern for the Egyptian peasantry from 305 to 30 bc. The biblical Joseph is actually very similar to another Joseph whose story is told by Flavius Josephus (Jewish Antiquities 12.4) and explicitly set under the Ptolemies. This Joseph, a man “of great reputation among the people of Jerusalem, for gravity, prudence, and justice,” was appointed as Judea’s tax collector by Ptolemy after promising to bring back double the tax revenues of his competitors. “The king was pleased to hear that offer; and, because it augmented his revenues, said he would confirm the sale of the taxes to him.” Joseph fulfilled his contract by murdering several prominent citizens and confiscating their property. He became extremely rich and was thus able to help his coreligionists. Therefore, concludes the Jewish historian, Joseph “was a good man, and of great magnanimity; he brought the Jews out of a state of poverty and meanness, to one that was more splendid.” The proximity of the two Joseph narratives suggests that they derive from the same matrix. It is also worth noting that Josephus believed that the Jewish community in Alexandria had been brought there as slaves from Judaea and Samaria several hundred years before his time and that 200,000 had been liberated by Ptolemy II” (Jewish Antiquities 12.7–11). Historians are not exactly sure about the origin of the Jewish population in Egypt, but agree that there were about one million Jews in Alexandria, with privileges and wealth that even angered the Greeks.

The story of the biblical Joseph, ending with his tribe becoming rich and numerous, is echoed in Exodus 1:7–10:

But the Israelites were fruitful and prolific; they became so numerous and powerful that eventually the whole land was full of them. Then there came to power in Egypt a new king who had never heard of Joseph. “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites are now more numerous and stronger than we are. We must take precautions to stop them from increasing any further, or if war should break out, they might join the ranks of our enemies. They might take arms against us and then escape from the country.”

Pharaoh then subjected the Israelites to forced labor, until Moses came to rescue them.

Before fleeing Egypt, “the Israelites … asked the Egyptians for silver and golden jewelry, and clothing. Yahweh made the Egyptians so much impressed with the people that they gave them what they asked. So they despoiled the Egyptians” (Ex 12:35–36). That is rather peculiar. Why would the Egyptians entrust their valuables to an enslaved and destitute people on the run? Were the Egyptians that stupid, and the Israelites such expert conmen?

Or did the story here collide with another one, in which the Israelites were not forced laborers, but pawnbrokers and moneylenders? That other story would dovetail well with the Joseph prologue. It also has a familiar ring: medieval history is full of episodes of Jews gaining inordinate power by financial and political intrigues, until a king expels them to protect his people. In England, for example, Jews had become wealthy and influential by the twelfth century—with one of them, Aaron of Lincoln, becoming the richest man in England—until king Edward I expelled them in 1290 for their abuse of usury.[1]

We’ll never know exactly the pre-biblical story behind the biblical story, if there is one. But it is noteworthy that while in Exodus 12:39 the Hebrews were “driven out of Egypt”, in Exodus 6:1 Yahweh warns Moses that “he will expel them” from Pharaoh’s land, which may reflect an earlier redaction layer.

More importantly, we do know that the Egyptians of the Hellenistic period had alternative versions of the Exodus. In those versions that have come down to us in Greek, the Jews were expelled from Egypt for spreading some kind of contagious disease and/or offending the gods. As long as the biblical Exodus was believed to have been written before 500 bc, it was assumed that those late alternative versions were malicious distortions of it. As the age of the Torah is now being revised downward by the minimalists of the Copenhagen School, that interpretation is called into question.

Is Exodus the Jewish rewriting of a story of Jewish expulsion from Egypt? For a probe into this question, we turn again to Russell Gmirkin’s book Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch (T&T Clark, 2006). We have followed in the previous article his argument that Genesis 1–11 used Berossus’s Babyloniaca written in the 3rd century bc. We shall now examine his second claim: that Exodus uses Manetho’s Aegyptiaca written in the same period.

Hecataeus of Abdera

Manetho was an Egyptian priest who wrote a history of the Egyptians in Greek, Aegyptiaca, around 285–280 bc, toward the end of the reign of Ptolemy I Soter. Like so many other sources of that period, the book is known only from quotations by later authors, notably Flavius Josephus in his apologetic book Against Apion, written against those who “will not believe what I have written concerning the antiquity of our nation, while they take it for a plain sign that our nation is of a late date, because they are not so much as vouchsafed a bare mention by the most famous historiographers among the Greeks” (Against Apion I,1).

Manetho was not the first author of a history of Egypt in Greek. Some thirty to forty years before him (around 320–315 bc), Hecataeus of Abdera had written a first Aegyptiaca, which Manetho probably used to write his own. It has not survived either but is quoted briefly by Flavius Josephus in Against Apion and more extensively by Diodorus Siculus, who used it as the basis for the first book of his Historical Library. Hecataeus is actually the first known Greek author to mention the Jews or Judeans (Herodotus, around 425 bc, knew only of the Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine). Diodorus contains a story (Library 40.3.1–8)[2], generally attributed to Hecataeus, about a pestilence that arose in Egypt and was attributed to the gods. The Egyptians decided to expel from their lands the “many foreigners of all sorts dwelling in their midst and practicing different rites of religion and sacrifice.” The greater number of these foreigners settled in Judea under the conduct of their leader Moses, “outstanding both for his wisdom and for his courage”. He founded Jerusalem, built a temple, gave his people laws, and divided them into twelve tribes; “as a result of their own expulsion from Egypt he introduced a kind of misanthropic and inhospitable way of life.”

For several reasons which I cannot detail here, Gmirkin considers that the Hecataean authorship of this passage is mistaken, and that “it is better interpreted as coming from Theophanes of Mytilene, like the material before and after it.”[3] Since Theophanes wrote in 62 bc, that passage would then be irrelevant to the quest for the origin of the Exodus narrative, which is at least three centuries older. Whether Gmirkin is right or wrong on this particular issue does not matter very much, because the strength of his theory relies on a substantial amount of evidence that the biblical Exodus borrows directly from Manetho, regardless of what Hecataeus had written before. (And even if the authors of the Pentateuch used Hecataeus instead of Manetho, that would still prove that the Pentateuch is not older than 320 bc.)

Manetho’s two “Jewish” stories

Manetho’s Aegyptiaca, a widely known book in Hellenistic period, contains two accounts of the expulsion of aliens from Egypt into South Syria and Judea, both quoted by Josephus in Against Apion.

The first account (Apion 1.73–105) recalls the conquest and rule of Egypt by foreigners called the Hyksos or Shepherd Kings. The Hyksos were violent invaders from Lower Syria who dominated Egypt for more than five hundred years, according to Manetho. Historians commonly date them to the eighteenth century bc.[4] They established their capital in Avaris, in the northeastern region of the Nile Delta. Manetho also tells us (Apion 1.237) that Avaris was from ancient times dedicated to the god Seth (translated as Typhon in Greek), and that the Hyksos worshipped Seth exclusively, while destroying the temples of the other gods. One ancient papyrus deciphered in the nineteenth century (Papyrus Sallier 1) confirms that the Hyksos king Apophis “chose for his lord the god Seth. He did not worship any other deity in the whole land except Seth.”[5] The relationship between the Hyksos and the ancient Israelites is a hotly debated topic, but it bears mentioning that one petty Egyptian king named Yaqub-Har (also known as Yak-Baal) was possibly a Hyksos.

Here is the beginning of Josephus’s direct quote from Manetho:

A people of ignoble origin from the east, whose coming was unforeseen, had the audacity to invade the country, which they mastered by main force without difficulty or even a battle. Having overpowered the chiefs, they then savagely burnt the cities, razed the temples of the gods to the ground, and treated the whole native population with the utmost cruelty, massacring some, and carrying off the wives and children of others into slavery.

Ultimately, Manetho continues, the kings of the Thebaid and the rest of Egypt rose in revolt against them, and after a long war, during which the Hyksos retreated to Avaris, they were finally expelled into Judea by Tethmosis (founder of Dynasty XVIII in ca. 1550 bc). “Then, terrified by the might of the Assyrians, who at that time were masters of Asia, they [the Hyksos] built a city in the country now called Judea, capable of accommodating their vast company, and gave it the name of Jerusalem” (Apion 1.90). Manetho does explicitly identify the Hyksos with the Israelites, and it doesn’t seem that he is here echoing Exodus. Yet this is what Josephus claims, believing — or feigning to believe — that Manetho’s Aegyptiaca was written long after the Torah, that the Hyksos were “our forefathers the shepherds” (1.103), and that Manetho is trying to give them a bad reputation by calling them “a people of ignoble origin” who savagely burnt cities, razed temples, massacred the people and enslaved women and children.

The second story taken from Manetho and included by Josephus in Against Apion 1.228–251 (“to prove our antiquity”), begins like this:

This author [Manetho], having promised to translate the history of Egypt from the sacred books, begins by stating that our ancestors entered Egypt in their myriads and subdued the inhabitants, and goes on to admit that they were afterwards driven out of the country, occupied what is now Judea, founded Jerusalem, and built the temple. So far he followed the chronicles; but at this point, under the pretext of recording fables and current reports about the Jews, he took the liberty of introducing some incredible tales, wishing to represent us as mixed up with a crowd of Egyptian lepers and others, who for various maladies were condemned, as he asserts, to banishment from the country.

Manetho, according to Josephus, relates that the Hyksos were invited back into Egypt during Dynasty XIX by certain polluted Egyptians led by an apostate priest from Hieropolis called Osarseph. These lepers, allied to the Hyksos, ruled Egypt for 13 years until they too were expelled by a pharaoh named Harnesses, and retreated back to Judea.[6]

Manetho’s direct quote ends with: “It is said that the priest of Heliopolitan origin who gave them a constitution and laws—named Osarseph, after the god Osiris worshiped in Heliopolis—changed his name when he came among this people and took the name Moses” (Apion 1.250). As far as we can tell, this is the only connection Manetho makes between the lepers and the Jews, and it comes “almost as an afterthought,” as Gmirkin comments.[7] This would be rather odd if Manetho was here rewriting the biblical Exodus story. Despite what Josephus claims, Manetho is not engaging in polemics against the Jews, here. Gmirkin believes that it is instead Exodus that uses Manetho’s account in a polemical way.

[T]he parallels between Manetho’s account of the Hyksos and the Jewish Exodus account are numerous and striking. Both Hyksos and Jews were foreigners in Egypt evicted by the Egyptians. Both were described as shepherds. Both were centered, at the time of their expulsion, at the eastern border of Egypt. Accounts of both Hyksos and Jews recorded a “blast of God” on Egypt. Both groups were known as spoilers of the Egyptians, and both, after having been driven from Egypt, settled in Jerusalem in the geographical territory of Judea. There were, of course, important differences as well. Whereas the Hyksos enslaved and attempted to exterminate the Egyptians, the Jews were said to have been slaves and captives when the Egyptians tried to drive them to extinction. There clearly exists some sort of genetic relationship between the accounts of Manetho and the Pentateuch, one apparent to later writers such as Josephus and others. Yet Manetho shows no trace of dependence or even awareness of Jewish traditions. This strongly suggests the possibility that Manetho was chronologically prior to the Exodus account and that the Pentateuchal tradition was dependent on Manetho.[8]

Bear in mind that the question at hand is not about the historical reliability of Manetho’s stories on the Hyksos, but about the relationship between his stories and Exodus.[9] The important result of Gmirkin’s intertextual analysis is that Manetho relied on native Egyptian records and literature (in which the memory of the Hyksos was colored by later events of the Persian period), and that “there is no evidence that Manetho read or knew of the existence of Jewish writings.”[10] Manetho does not engage in polemics against the Jews. Nor does he formally equate the Hyksos with the Jews (he mentions that some say the Hyksos were Arabs, 1.83). In his first story, he rather sees the Hyksos as precursors to the Jews. In his second story, he simply refers to a contemporary oral tradition that equates the polluted and apostate priest Osarseph with Moses. There is therefore no reason to believe that Manetho responds to the biblical Exodus story. The comparative analysis of the parallels between the two stories suggest rather the opposite: that the authors of Exodus used tips and historical landmarks from Manetho’s account to fabricate the Exodus story and give it a plausible historical context and the prestige of antiquity.

Here are some of the most conclusive parallels.

Avaris and the region of Goshen: The Hyksos established their capital in Avaris, in the northeastern region of the Nile Delta. The city was abandoned after the Hyksos’ demise, until Ramesses II rebuilt a new city slightly to the north, called Pi-Ramesses, in the thirteenth century bc. This corresponds to the region that Genesis and Exodus calls the region of Goshen, where the tribe of Jacob is confined. “Significantly,” writes Gmirkin, “Exodus also identified ‘Raamses’ as one of the treasure cities built by the enslaved Israelites (Exod 1:11). The Jews of the Exodus were thus localized in the precise region occupied by the Hyksos in Manetho.”[11] In the Bible however, “this was not due to a military defeat; rather, Joseph requested that his tribe be allowed to settle there. In Genesis, the Jews were granted this isolated portion of Egypt because of their profession, that of shepherds. Genesis thus acknowledged the essential facts in Manetho — the shepherd Hyksos’ confinement in eastern Egypt — but suggested that this was a simple accommodation to their offensive profession, not because of an Egyptian rebellion against oppression by Shepherd Kings.”[12]

The plagues: There is a striking parallel between Manetho’s mention of a plague in his second story, and the plagues on Egypt in Exodus. This parallel has often been interpreted to imply that Manetho was aware of the Jewish Exodus story but was rewriting it with an anti-Semitic bias. Gmirkin argues that, on the contrary, the Pentateuchal account contains polemics against Manetho. The biblical authors, Gmirkin says, respond to Manetho by claiming that “the Egyptians brought the plagues on themselves by refusing to let the Jews depart peacefully.”[13] There are other probable references to Manetho’s lepers in the Moses story:

There was, first, the assertion that Moses could turn his hand leprous and heal it at will as a magical sign to Pharaoh (Exod 4:6–7). There was additionally the strange story of Miriam’s brief leprosy, imposed on her by God as punishment for rebellion (Num 12:10). Both these anecdotes appear to have been polemics against the charge that all the Jews of Egypt had leprosy. … A very interesting passage at Deut 28:60 warned that if the Jews ever apostasized, God would “bring on them again the diseases of Egypt.” This quote appears to acknowledge the tradition in Manetho that the Jews of the Exodus had suffered from various diseases while residing in Egypt. The passage implied that these diseases had been brought on them as punishment for not worshipping the true God. Manetho’s story of the Jews arising from diseased Egyptians was thus acknowledged and handled in a variety of ways in the Pentateuch.[14]

Slavery: In Manetho’s account, the Hyksos massacre and enslave the native Egyptians. In the Exodus story, it is the Egyptians who enslave the Israelites. According to Gmirkin, “the story of the enslavement of the Israelites by the Egyptians can be interpreted as a polemical response to the story of the enslavement of the Egyptians by the Hyksos in Manetho. The Exodus story appears to have claimed, ‘We did not enslave the Egyptians, the Egyptians enslaved us.’”[15] And while in Manetho the Egyptians revolted against the Hyksos, in Exodus “the situation was reversed: rather than the Egyptians revolting, the Egyptians dominated the Jews until the Jews revolted under the leadership of Moses.”[16]

Looting of temples: Manetho referred to the Hyksos looting the Egyptians. “Exodus 12:35–36 said that the Jews spoiled the Egyptians, and listed the loot they obtained as golden ornaments and clothes. This may have referred to golden vessels and gods’ robes from the temples. If so, it may display awareness of the tradition in Manetho that the Hyksos pillaged the Egyptian temples. In the Pentateuch’s account, it was claimed that this loot was not seized violently, but given voluntarily by the Egyptians out of love for the Jews.”[17] This is, according to Gmirkin, “a defensive response to Manetho’s account.”[18]

Treaty with Pharaoh: According to Manetho, as quoted by Josephus (Apion 1.88), the Pharaoh Thoummosis laid siege to the Hyksos capital city of Avaris. Failing to take the city, he concluded a treaty with the Hyksos, under which they were to evacuate Egypt. Gmirkin comments: “This prolonged siege, ending with a treaty by which the Shepherds were allowed to depart Egypt, has an obvious and striking parallel with the extended effort by Moses to persuade Pharaoh to allow the Israelites to depart Egypt. In Manetho, as in the Exodus account, the Pharaoh finally despaired and agreed to let the foreigners depart.”[19] In Manetho the Hyksos are defeated militarily by Pharaoh, while in the Pentateuch, Moses defeats Pharaoh with magic. Moreover, the biblical Jews are merely trying to leave Egypt against Pharaoh’s will. “Here the parallel with Manetho’s account is striking, for Manetho reported that Ramesses’ army pursued the fleeing Hyksos and polluted Egyptians across the desert in a series of military encounters that drove them back into Syria (1.266–277). The Exodus account preserved the pursuit of Pharaoh’s army, but had it end badly for the Egyptians.” Obviously, for Gmirkin, “a forcible Egyptian expulsion of the Jews appears to lurk behind the story of the Exodus.”[20]

As Derek Lambert mentions in his remarkable documentary film Moses and the Invention of Israel’s Greatest Story, partly based on Gmirkin’s work, the notion that the parallels between Manetho and the book of Exodus is best explained by an influence from the Manetho tradition rather than the reverse has now firmly entered mainstream scholarship. For example, Thomas Römer believes that: “The biblical redactor opposes to the tradition of the lepers known by Manetho the affirmation that Moses’ leprosy was only momentary; it happened in the context of a transfer of divine powers to him.”[21] Römer also recognizes that the “blind motif” in Exodus 1:10, “the idea that Egypt is at war and that the Hebrews could join the enemies of Egypt” was inserted “in reaction to the tradition related by Manetho.”[22] Likewise, Lester L. Grabbe, considers the possibility “that the story of the plagues, and the transformation of an expulsion into a miraculous escape, is a Judaean revision of an older Egyptian story known to Hecataeus and Manetho.”  The difference is that, in order to preserve a pre-Hellenistic date for the book of Exodus, Römer and Grabbe postulate that its author knew not Manetho, but a more ancient book that Manetho also used. Since there is no trace of this book, Gmirkin’s hypothesis is more economic (Occam’s razor).[23]

From Gmirkin’s conclusion:

The evidence for the dependence of the Pentateuch on Manetho is of two types. First, there are the many details shared by the Exodus account and Manetho’s description of the Hyksos. Second — and at first glance paradoxically — there are the many other details in which the Pentateuch and Manetho were in diametric disagreement. … But the points of agreement and disagreement are anything but random or arbitrary. Rather, there is a systematic, consistent, predictable pattern in the points of similarity and violent contradiction. This pattern is intrinsic to the nature of polemics and is easy to describe. On details that were neutral to the reputation of the Jews, the Pentateuch accepted Manetho’s account. The Pentateuch indeed accepted as much of Manetho’s account as possible, due to the authority and reputation of Manetho. But on details that reflected unfavorably on the Jews, the Pentateuch actively contradicted the account in Manetho. The purpose of the Pentateuch story was not to reject Manetho’s authoritative account in its entirety, based as it was on ancient Egyptian records. Rather, the authors of the Jewish Exodus story chose their battles carefully, accepting the basic framework of Manetho’s account, accepting whatever details were deemed harmless, but rising to the defense of the Jews on every point of honor. Such was the essential character of polemical literature.

… It was precisely in all details in which Manetho criticized the Hyksos that the Exodus account provided an alternative version. The Jews, instead of conquering Egypt and ruling it for six generations, resided there for a similar period, first as peaceful immigrants invited by a friendly Pharaoh and later as captives. Instead of a Hyksos oppression of Egypt, there was an Egyptian oppression of the Jews. When Manetho described the Hyksos massacring Egyptians and subjecting the women and children to slavery and trying to “exterminate the Egyptian stock,” the Exodus account described the enslavement of the Jews by the Egyptians and slaying of male Jewish offspring. Instead of the Hyksos occupation of Egypt being equated with a “blast of God,” in Exodus God smote Egypt for refusing to allow the Jews to depart. The Pentateuch accepted that the Jews, like the Hyksos, spoiled the Egyptians — and there are even hints that the spoils included goods from Egyptian temples — but the Exodus account insisted that the Egyptians gave the Jews these spoils voluntarily, in return for the many years the Jews toiled as slaves. All major points of criticism against the Hyksos were answered in the Jewish account.

… In summary, Manetho’s account of the Hyksos appears to have been based on native Egyptian records and displays no knowledge of Jewish tradition. Conversely, the Pentateuchal account shows considerable knowledge of Manetho’s account, agreeing on the overall historical framework but engaging in polemics on precisely such details as reflected badly on the Jews. The evidence points to the Exodus account having been a response to Manetho rather than Manetho having responded to Jewish traditions.[24]

Therefore: “A search for the history behind the Jewish Sojourn and Exodus is misguided: these stories appear to contain nothing more substantial than polemics against Manetho.”[25] The Exodus never happened, which is why archaeologists cannot connect a single item to it. It is as fictitious as the kingdom of Solomon.[26]

Concerning Osarseph, the polluted priest who led the lepers to Judea according to Manetho, Gmirkin makes an additional point, which brings us back to Joseph.

The relationship between the names Osarseph and Joseph has often been noted. Most often it has been suggested that the name Osarseph substitutes the Egyptian theophoric element Osar (from Osiris) for the Jewish theophoric element Yah. However, the only Jewish figure referred to in Manetho was Moses, which renders that suggestion dubious: if Osarseph was based on Joseph, why did Manetho report his identification with Moses? Given that Manetho made no connection between Osarseph and Joseph, a relationship between these figures is plausible only if the transformation took place in the opposite direction: that the name Joseph derived from Manetho’s Osarseph. Significantly, while Manetho identified Osarseph as an Egyptian priest from Heliopolis, Joseph — though not himself a priest — married one Asenath, the daughter of Potipherah, an Egyptian priest from Heliopolis. This tradition denied that Joseph (Osarseph) was himself an Egyptian priest of Heliopolis, but instead claimed that he merely married into a priestly family of that city.[27]

The fact that the biblical figures of Joseph and Moses are both linked to Manetho’s Osarseph is consistent with the fact that they appear as variations on the same pattern, being both Israelites introduced into the royal palace, who intervene on behalf of their people—a pattern that also appears in the books of Esther and Daniel, all complete fictions of the Hellenistic period (most obviously in the case of Daniel, because his “prophecies” are just too accurate).

Conclusion

Let us ponder on the liberating potential of Gmirkin’s radical biblical revisionism. It is said that history is written by the victor. But the Bible teaches us a more profound truth: he who writes history is the ultimate victor, regardless of whether he won any battle at all. He is the conqueror of the minds. The Israelites were beaten by the Babylonians, yet they have imposed their narrative to the world, in which they are the holy goodies and the Babylonians the satanic baddies. The Israelites didn’t need to beat the Egyptians militarily to beat them in the “war of books”: Manetho’s Aegyptiaca disappeared but for a few bits and pieces, while its plagiarized version in Exodus conquered (and enslaved) more than half of mankind.

The Jews’ false narratives are the sources of their power, and the biblical narrative is the matrix of them all. Russell Gmirkin’s biblical minimalism is the Good News that will set us free: it proves that the Pentateuch was written in the third century bc by plagiarizing the Greek literature (Berossus, Manetho, Plato, etc.). It proves that the People of the Book didn’t have a book when there were already more than 200,000 books in the Library of Alexandria. It proves that the “inventors of monotheism” had just recently become monotheists when every philosopher had been talking about God.

How liberating it is, therefore, to get a few faint echoes of the voice of the ancient Egyptians. Their take on the Jews deserves to be heard and vindicated. In the early second century ce, Plutarch wrote a treaty On Isis and Osiris, in which he presents various esoteric interpretations of the myth that he heard from Egyptians. While Isis and Osiris are the divine founders of Egyptian civilization, Osiris’s jealous brother Seth, who treacherously murdered Osiris, is the enemy of civilization, the god of nomadic raiders, of confusion, deception, civil war, famine and sickness. He is the nearest thing to the devil in Egyptian religion. In chapter 31, Plutarch mentions that some Egyptians believed that, after being banished from Egypt by the council of the gods, Seth wandered in Palestine where he fathered two sons, Hierosolymos and Youdaios (Jerusalem and Judean or Jew). Seth, in other words, is the divine ancestor of the Jews.

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[1] Richard Huscroft, Expulsion: England’s Jewish Solution, The History Press, 2006, pp. 41-45.

[2] Fragment FGrHist 264 F 6 in Felix Jacoby, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker,

[3] Russell E. Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch, T&T Clark, 2006, p. 42.

[4] The tendency is now to shorten Egyptian chronology, which would make the Hyksos more recent.

[5] Quoted in Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, p. 48.

[6] Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus, op. cit., pp. 37 and 170-171.

[7] Ibid., p. 193.

[8] Ibid.,  pp. 187-189.

[9] “Some Egyptologists now believe that the Hyksos dynasty arose, not by means of an invasion from South Syria, but among an indigenous ‘foreign’ population of the eastern Delta, namely, Arameans and others who had settled in this region in the previous centuries” (Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus, op. cit., p. 172).

[10] Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus, op. cit., p. 37.

[11] Ibid., p. 177.

[12] Ibid., p. 180.

[13] Ibid., p. 189.

[14] Ibid., p. 211.

[15] Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus, op. cit., p. 176.

[16] Ibid., p. 180.

[17] Ibid., p. 212.

[18] Ibid., p. 183.

[19] Ibid., p. 183.

[20] Ibid., p. 213.

[21] Thomas Römer in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, vol. 1, Mohr Siebeck, 2012, p. 68.

[22] Ibid., p. 71.

[23] Lester L. Grabbe, Did Moses Speaks Attic? Sheffield Academic Press, 2001, p. 121.

[24] Ibid., pp. 188-190.

[25] Ibid., p. 214.

[26] Israel Finkelstein and Neil Adher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, S&S International, 2007.

[27] Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus, op. cit., p. 211.